Graduate Student, Penn State Hershey College of Medicine

>> My name is Jenna Buckwalder [assumed spelling], and I'm a graduate student at Penn State. My program is Genetics, but I study chromatin structure, and just to keep that simple, basically we look at how DNA structure is in the nucleus under different conditions. And that is what my thesis project is basically based on. A busy day is not sitting at my computer a whole lot. A busy day in the lab is constantly on my feet. It took me a while to get to that level where I could do multiple experiments in one day. So a busy day, you know, I come in in the morning, I start an experiment, and then while that is incubating or needs time to run, I can start something else. But what I like the most is that it's different every day. So I could have a day where I'm just working in the lab on experiments and things like that, and then the next day, maybe I'm looking at the data and planning the next couple of steps that need to be done. But maybe nothing worked, too, and that's the other beauty of research is that you can work, you know, a whole week, or a whole month, and nothing is really panning out for you, so it takes a lot of perseverance. But that is pretty much a day. You know, working in the lab. But you know, writing papers, reading papers, looking up things. Troubleshooting. Then there is a whole mix. And it's very challenging. So I guess I take for granted how different my days are. They're never really all the same.